It’s another Flashback Friday here on Spend Matters. You don’t want to risk missing out on another one of our most popular Ask the Expert webinars of all time: Providers Who Actually Get to the Root of Risk & Compliance. As Thomas Kase, vice president of research, warns in this webinar from our archives, risk is lurking ahead for every procurement organization regarding finances, performance and compliance. You need to manage this risk to avoid the consequences. How do you do this effectively? And, which solution providers offer the best tools to help procurement organizations tackle risk? (Hint: Check out the webinar!)

In a late June ruling, the US Supreme Court struck down Environmental Protection Agency directed regulations for limiting mercury and toxic emissions from coal and oil power plants. From a procurement and supply chain vantage point, the ruling is arguably the most important decision the nation’s highest court has made in the past decade. Not only does it cut to the very heart of procurement’s mission to manage costs, but it has direct linkages with energy sourcing and category management. The decision also highlights the need for procurement to work more closely with public affairs and public policy teams inside their organizations. This Spend Matters PRO brief analyzes the implications of the ruling for procurement and supply chain organizations and provides recommendations for manufacturers and non-manufacturers alike on how to take action around policy and regulations.

Contract management is undergoing a transformation, moving from the back of the procurement kitchen to nearly taking center stage. A good part of the reason is the corporate transition from a more passive "risk viewed as lack of compliance" efforts toward a more dynamic and comprehensive approach to risk management. This approach doesn't just examine legal clauses as such. Nor does it merely ensure that agreed upon prices and SLA deliverables are met, although those reasons are obviously part of the equation. There’s more to it – much more. In this Spend Matters PRO research brief, we begin by reviewing the core components of CLM systems, and then we explore the path to predictive contract negotiations, delving into the intersections of big data, predictive analytics and contract management.

Over the past decade, supplier management solutions have evolved dramatically. Many started by serving as basic tools to meet data gathering needs for both procurement- and accounts Payable-led supplier onboarding to becoming effective instruments supporting sourcing initiatives. More recently, these solutions have even started to turn risk management initiatives from a lagging rear-view mirror exercise to a forward-looking assessment process that helps corporations stay on top of their third-party risk exposure. But what is next for these solutions? At Spend Matters, we think it is a fairly low-hanging fruit to more actively bring in contractual data into your SLM or third party management solutions. This is precisely what Hiperos is aiming to accomplish. The provider’s latest release is taking aim for the first time at this area, joining a set of related – although not yet directly competitive – capabilities from Apttus, Seal and others.

Procurement has increasing access to multiple levels of insider information. And just as we have seen enforcement impacting procurement and supply chain activities centered on FCPA compliance, it is likely an increasing set of activities tied to potential information leaks in the capital markets area will come under more scrutiny as well. In the first installment of this Spend Matters PRO research brief examining the potential for insider trading based on procurement information, authored by Thomas Kase, vice president of research, we covered lessons from other areas of the business as well as introducing the types of insider information that could be acted on by those inside the company or shared with external hedge funds or other parties. In this installment, we explore what you need to know about the potential for procurement and insider trading based on increasing data availability within procurement and supply chain organizations and key action steps you can take to prevent breeches.

Have you considered the potential for insider trading violations and the ensuing lawsuits that could arise from access to procurement information? Perhaps this hasn't even entered your mind. With increasing data availability (spend data, supplier risk/management information, demand data) at the fingertips of procurement professionals and others in the organization, the opportunity to access information that could be used to provide an "advantage" in the capital markets has never been greater. Traditionally, such information (if available at all) was available solely to company “insiders” who could only trade within certain windows (and with other restrictions placed on them). In this multi-part Spend Matters PRO analysis, Spend Matters Vice President of Research Thomas Kase explores the growing potential of procurement-related information to create the opportunity for insider trading information.

How much information do you share internally? How much should you share? Who has a need to know? These are important questions to ask as you drive procurement change management and solution adoption throughout your organization. Providing timely information and presenting it in a way that makes the context clear in the hands of the right business users, who can take corrective action before the situation gets out of hand, is key to maintaining a consistent level of performance across the organization. In this Spend Matters PRO research brief, we consider the brewing information clash that companies are likely to face with exploding reams of procurement information available to an increasing number of stakeholders – and non-stakeholders – alike.

In previous installments of this PRO series, Spend Matters VP of Research Thomas Kase discussed the amount of risk companies face when deploying workers around the globe and what precautions the company and its workers must take. In Part 1, he specifically talked about duty of care provisions, and in Part 2, he continued his analysis of corporate travel risks. Today, he completes the series, offering a number of recommendations companies should take regarding T&E management.

What do companies need to be aware of when managing corporate travel and a global workforce? Spend Matters VP of Research Thomas Kase, who has experience working abroad and is our main source for T&E management, started this PRO series discussing the amount of risk a company faces when deploying workers around the globe, how much money a company should allocated to risk mitigation and what is required under duty of care provisions. You can check it out here. Here, in Part 2, Thomas continues this analysis of travel risks and corporate obligations.

Vendors hawking T&E software that spans travel booking and expense management claim that it is not just about policy compliance, but that it is also about the risk management benefits of actually seeing where employees (or contractors) are and, in the event of an emergency, being able to provide support as quickly as possible. In this multi-part Spend Matters PRO research brief, Spend Matters VP of Research Thomas Kase provides a primer on managing travel and the global corporate workforce, including the requirements and limits of duty of care provisions – and what procurement needs to know and how far it should consider going both as good business practice and under the law.

Today's Spend Matters PRO research brief covers the cool company that you probably haven’t even heard of, Riskmethods, which delivers risk management that is dynamic, in near real-time, and even forward-looking. It even has a fun user interface. Their solution loads all your suppliers and their locations, shipping lanes, etc., as well as your own company’s locations (as many and as much detail as you see relevant) whether offices, manufacturing, or distribution sites. At the end of the exercise you have your world map with a lot of dots and connecting lines like the one above. The types of tracked factors are pulled in from various publicly available and/or premium content sources and populates your personalized supply chain world view.

Today (August 14) we have invited Riskmethods to a webinar where we will discuss what can be done to understand supply chain exposure to pandemics (the current Ebola issue is obviously front of mind), as well as other risks that are more of a personal nature (crime, violence, geo-disasters like tsunamis) – please join us! What can you do about this issue and similar events that might disrupt your supply chain and/or put your employees and suppliers at risk?

Ebola is a disease that presents as a hemorrhagic fever. These are not exactly comforting words, as those afflicted bleed profusely (from the inside) and up to 90 percent of those afflicted die, depending on the breakout and treatment. Scary, for sure. But Ebola is not just a virulent killer of people – it is also, potentially, a killer of supply chains.

Let’s move on to procurement issues and see what can be done. First of all, as a starting point there are actually many similarities between Ebola to geopolitical supply chain issues (e.g. extreme kidnapping risks in many areas of Mexico, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other places). But an illness migrates more easily than crime does, and with an incubation period as long as 21 days travellers returning from hot areas have a lot of time to have physical contact with others. Since it is impossible to track all individuals, it seems most prudent to add this to the list of factors (political, natural disasters, geological events, legal, financial, bankruptcies, corruption, crime, violence) that are part of better risk management solutions. In this Spend Matters PRO research brief, VP of Research Thomas Kase looks at how this can be done with an approach based on the solution available from Riskmethods, a Munich-based company.